TV Whirl (at 5) - Revision 13 (5/4/2006)

You can fastforward and rewind on QuickTime!

Can someone please please help me, I don't know whats wrong.

I've been visiting TV Whirl and downloading clips for a while but about a month ago I couldn't get onto the site as it kept coming up "page cannot be displayed". Then a few days ago, to my surprise, it connected and I thought nothing more of it but tried connecting again today and it either comes up "we can't find www.tvwhirl.co.uk" or "page cannot be displayed",
Is it something wrong with my internet or is it TV Whirl?

I'd appreciate any information anyone has as it's really bugging me.

Thank you,
LoveTV

Hmm.. thats awfully strange, because it works perfect for me.
Whats you ISP?

I can't justify Real and it's godawful bloatware and it's codecs, although not just being AVI over again, are still fairly pants. WMV is respectable but still not my thing, it's not as terrible as any Real codec but still isn't much good but you must keep those bad folk on eBay hawking your hours of slaving over a humid capture card and an old Betamax toploader for a few of your british pounds. Just means that I won't be seeing much of it because there's no fourth way besides those three and the smartish option of encoding in anything but QT puts me off due to jerky playback and blocking, not to say a savvy thief couldn't snap up your current RM and WMV files and put them on a DVD right now, oh no...

Well about those people unable to access the site. This seems to be an issue with ISPs resolving to the domain names more than anything, and usually sorts itself in a short while. Thankfully its nowhere near as bad as a host I was using a little further back where pretty much anyone with a broadband ISP was having trouble getting into the site (Nini can probably testify to that one!); indeed this is the first report I've had of the problem since moving.

As for the stuff about Quicktime, I'm afraid I'm not really following the logic there. Even if there was stuff in that format, it would suffer exactly the same problems of jerkiness and blockiness that the other two do. It's still based upon Mpeg4, and would still have to be put on the site at similar bitrates to the other two, so would still suffer the same problems (worse actually, as the bog standard Mp4 codec is poorer quality at low bitrate than some of the newer variants). On saying that, not many of the clips (particularly newer ones) suffer stuttering or jerking as a result of the compression, as I've always been very determined to have an equal frame rate over the clip. Any dropped frames that are there are either because of some very high motion, which would happen with any compression, or as a result of a flaw in the original AVI capture; Hauppauge's WinTV USB card was very poor quality and drops these things all over the place, though thankfully I'm on a decent piece of hardware from Pinnacle these days (shame about their software mind!)

In terms of the other two, Real has the better codecs for small clips via web delivery, whilst Windows Media is really better for higher bandwidth stuff like an archived copy of a DVD, and is mainly on the site for legacy reasons. The deblocking filter on RM greatly improves the quality for the small clips, but leaves higher quality stuff looking blurred to hell, whilse Microsoft's technology works great at higher quality, but is more blocky at lower bitrates. That's why I've tended to favour Real over WMV (especially given the latest version of Microsoft's encoder, when it works, just uses whatever bitrate it likes; not what you tell it. Wait until Revision 12 comes online and compare some of the RM/WMV filesizes, despite them both *supposedly* being the same rate). The main problem with Real, as has been pointed out, is that their software is bloated to hell, and it often doesn't work. Personally I use their proper player very little, and stick to something called Real Alternative, which lets it play through anything using Directshow (Windows Media Player for example). It wont playback their multiple rate 'surestream' crap, but anyone who puts those on a website for static download rather than streaming deserves to be shot!

Oh? Well, you are right about that there but makes little difference to me anyway, never download much there.

Yes, I realise what I did there, I'm just fighting for a better codec than Real's little offering.

I love the content on your site but I hate frames and I am hoping you shell make a no frame website aswell.

Okay, I have to admit that's amused me a little. The site does not use frames at all at the moment and hasn't since Revision 9. I hate them too as it causes no end of trouble when trying to bookmark pages, but like having the menu anchored so rewrote the whole thing using Stylesheets and Div tags, but not a single frame or Iframe. In actual fact this method has caused more problems on older browsers than frames ever would have (for example despite repeated attempts, IE5 Mac is still unusable)

Use tables, then.

I notice that videos in widescreen are in a dial up widescreen frame, which I can hardly see.
I would normally save the frame using 355 x 200 pixels.

Revision 12
Yes, after many many months of delays and setbacks, Revision 12 is online at last. It is made up of 195 files in total, 65 of them completely new, whilst the other 130 are redone files from Revisions 2 to 3.5, with much better quality than how they were (ie... actually more than a 9fps blur!). Not using this as an excuse to get rid of the old Windows Media Files though, I've done everything in both WMV and RM format.

Clips now use bigger picture sizes too (yes, that includes the widescreen ones DialUpBorg. Not quite as big as you mentioned, but bigger than they were), as well as the latest version of the Real and Microsoft codecs. I've been holding back somewhat on using the newer formats, however I think by now most people should have computers fast enough to play them (they go even on my 400mhz processor okay).

I've finally gotten round to some page reorganising too. Some pages have been removed, with their contents being moved into more appropriate places, others (such as the 'National News' page) have been split up, and finally the soap pages have at long last been reorganised from oldest to newest like every other page on the site has been for ages. Download pages have also been tidied up quite a bit, and the 'fun' section has been axed at long last. Yes, I'm a bit sad to lose Yorkshire Television's 6 Million Tin Openers ident, but most of the stuff on that page was shockingly poor with no remote semblance of fun, and it hasn't been updated since 2001.

For all those thinking I'd given up on the Worst Ad Awards, that has been brought bang up to date once more and I apologise for the gaps in that. Here's hoping it can settle back to how it was.

Unlike usual, I'm not going to bother quoting the full list of new files, and instead just point you towards the What's New page if you really want to find out... or just watch out for the new icons scattered around the site. Naturally with an update this big (and bloody hell it is big when you're uploading through dial-up!!), I'm bound to have made one or two mistakes somewhere, though I've tried to keep them down to minimal. If you do spot any, feel free to point them out and I'll fix them asap.

~ Enteirah
www.tvwhirl.co.uk

(Wow, more discussion in this thread when not updating than when I do a huge update. That's strangeness for ya )

Huzzah!

On the Adverts D-G page, though, the Daz advert is headlined as 'Daily Star 1993', instead of Daz 199whatever (can't be '93, Danny Baker was doing it then).

Similarly, the Jaffa Cakes advert on the H-L page says 2002 instead of 1983.